When I started out in leadership development 25 years ago, navigating complexity was the job of senior leaders. That’s changed dramatically today—with complexity now pushing down to people at all levels of organizations, from the C-Suite through to the front line.
With uncertainty and disruption rising fast, there’s a real sense of urgency to equip people to solve the challenges they’re facing — more organizations are seeking to scale leadership development programs. At Adeption, we’re seeing this drive an openness to new approaches we haven’t seen before, with L&D leaders asking us questions like, ‘What’s the best of the best you’ve seen? How can we learn from innovative approaches to scaling leadership development?’
The exciting thing is, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with organizations on some incredibly innovative development experiences that, taken together, offer a new way of thinking about leadership development.
The unprogram approach
We started using the term ‘the unprogram program’ at Adeption after working with a client on a design that broke away from the traditional Leadership Development Program model.
Instead of the typical set timeline of events and activities for participants, this experience combined expert curation with a concierge-style service. The leadership development team identified mandatory elements they wanted to include, such as in-person workshops at the start and end of the experience. The rest was concierge, giving leaders a range of learning moments to select from—to effectively ‘choose their own adventure’.
We combined this with Adeption’s Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better approach, which wraps development around participants’ current needs and context. Instead of asking them to ‘imagine if’, this allowed them to focus on their real challenges, ‘pull’ content for inspiration, share wisdom as a cohort, and bring development into the flow of their work through running experiments. It was an incredibly impactful design—and we’re seeing more of this fresh thinking emerging.
Other innovative approaches organizations are taking include:
- A major retailer we partner with is scaling high-impact leadership development to 2,OOO of its geographically-dispersed leaders, taking a participant-centered approach and using a mix of workshops, one-up manager engagement, peer wisdom sharing, self-paced development on our platform, and on-the-job experimentation at multiple points in the learning journey —with amazing results.
- A global SaaS company is scaling elements of its immersive executive leaders program—designed to prepare its top leaders for the future—with an open Adaptive Leadership program that’s available to all employees.
- A number of organizations we work with are tapping into the insight-sharing capabilities of our digital platform by creating ‘Wisdom Wikis’ — interactive forums for their leaders to give and get wisdom on the toughest challenges they’re facing, based on leaders’ real experiences.
Taken together, these approaches provide a way of reimagining the traditional leadership development program to make it more effective and efficient.
Start small with simple experiments
Reimaging your leadership development program doesn’t need to be an all or nothing approach—or require a huge upfront investment.
We find taking an MVP approach is usually a great way to get started and build proof for stakeholders to help gain momentum.
Consider these simple experiments you could run for an upcoming program:
- Take some key elements of your program for senior leaders and create a digital-only or short open-enrolment development experience available to all leaders or employees.
- Add a simple pick-your-path element to your program design so leaders can customize their learning to their needs.
- Wrap conversations in workshops around leaders’ real and current challenges, instead of around scenarios—by asking them to bring a challenge.
- Add a simple continuous learning pathway after the core program ends, such as ongoing peer connects to enable alumni to discuss and share wisdom on current challenges on a regular basis.
The key thing is to build in ways to gather evidence on the impact of the approach, assess what’s working and what’s not, and iterate to improve it.
Uncertainty as an opportunity
Breaking away from traditional approaches to leadership development—and empowering people at all levels with the tools to navigate complex challenges—can turn the disruption and volatility we’re facing today into an opportunity: the best time to develop is when conditions are challenging.
Imagine the impact of everyone in your organization taking conscious action to improve how they work, lead and live. What might be possible?
Curious to learn more about Adeption’s approach to leadership development? Reach out to Corey directly by emailing coreyc@adeption.io